Vietnam Part 2

The next place after Ho Chi Minh was Dalat and in order to get there, we needed a night bus which is away all the travelers uses to get around the country.

The night bus left at 1 am and it was about 6 hours to get to Dalat with only one 10 minutes stop about every 10 minutes. As it was our last night Ho Chi Minh we went out and was a bit drunk when we went on the bus.

The night bus is a great way to travel as it is nothing like the buses back home in the UK. As I thought the buses would just be a seat. But to my surprise, the seat was a bed. There are good and bad things about my experience using the night buses.

There are three downsides to it. Firstly, the beds are small as the Vietnamese are small and I am small so I just fit in. Secondly, you need to watch out for latecomers as the bus always gets overbooked and they will try and get you to swap seats so you can sit on the floor.

Lastly, the Watch out again for the Vietnamese trying to take your stuff, for example, my friend dropped his jumper and then next minute he was looking for it and saw it in another person’s bag so he got it back.

I can go on about how good the night bus is, but this article is not about them. There are two good things about them. The first is they normally leave around 6 pm, 8 pm or 1 am, so that means you get more time to explore the town and then arrive in the early morning, so you get more time to spend exploring. As well as this, the bus comes with free WIFI but you need to ask the bus driver before the bus starts moving what the password is.

Dalat

We arrived in Dalat in the early day about 8 am if I can remember. The first thing we did was look at the travel plans. To our surprised, we only had half a day in Dalat. So what we did was see what the latest night bus was and they only had one around 6 pm.

Then we went to get breakfast and the torrential rain hit us. We got bread and pork sandwich from a stool in the street and hen to the nearest tree to hide. To my wonder, I did not rely the tree we picked was on the roundabout.

Then we went to a coffee shop. where we spent most of our day. We wanted to mouton climbing to a waterfall but thought it would be slippy so changed our plans.

We decided to Trúc Lâm Temple that is a Zen Buddhist temple small drive outside Dalat. It had a cable cart to get to the temple. I assumed the cable cart would be stable. To my amazement, it was very shaky and I was a shard. The temple was high up a mounting which had amazing views of Dalat.

Then we went back to the coffee shop. Where we spent the rest of the day until it was time for our bus. We asked the kind coffee shop owner where to go for lunch. She told us a place where we had Pho again. The next place the bus was taking us o was NHA TRANG.

Visiting Vietnam sounds quite an adventure! It surely is a unique experience. Night bus with bed seats is unusual, although I would hardly get any sleep into a very crowded bus – especially after the incident you mentioned about your friend’s jumber.